March 23, 2026

Prix Turgot 2026: Reading the Room at Bercy

Yesterday evening I attended the 39th Prix Turgot at the Centre Pierre Mendès France in Bercy, France’s annual rendez-vous for the best books in financial and economic writing, one I always look forward to. The Grand Prix went to Dominique Foray for Innovations : une économie pour les temps à venir (La Découverte). I arrived with an already unreasonably long reading list and left with five new additions. Notes below.

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727-1781), sometimes called the French Adam Smith, published his Réflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses in 1766, a decade before The Wealth of Nations, arguing against government intervention, identifying capital accumulation as the engine of growth, and anticipating the theory of diminishing marginal returns. As Finance Minister under Louis XVI, he announced his programme in three lines to the king: no bankruptcy, no tax increases, no more loans. He abolished the guilds, freed the grain trade, replaced forced labour with a land tax. He lasted two years before vested interests had him dismissed. He had expressed while still a student at the Sorbonne the conviction that reforms were needed to forestall revolution. His work, which might well have prevented the cataclysm of 1789, was wrecked by the guilds and the nobility. The prize has borne his name since 1987, but this year, when most of the shortlist diagnoses the same pattern of reform blocked by institutional inertia, the parallel takes on a new dimension.

The prize. Created in 1987 by the Association des Élèves et Anciens Élèves de l’Institut des Hautes Finances, with Jean-Louis Chambon as founding Président. In 2009, Chambon extended the ecosystem by founding the Cercle Turgot, of which he remains Président fondateur et d’honneur. The prize is now presided by Kathleen Wantz-O’Rourke, CFO of Groupe Suez and IHFI alumna, the Cercle by Augustin de Romanet, and the reading committee by Jean-Jacques Pluchart and Florence Anglès, who together read and review 150 to 200 books annually before submitting a shortlist to the Grand Jury. Jean-Claude Trichet, former ECB President, has chaired that jury for over two decades, giving the prize a rare continuity of intellectual standards across editions.

The 2026 Cohort

Dominique Foray, Innovations : une économie pour les temps à venir (La Découverte, 2025)

Grand Prix nominee

Dominique Foray, Professor Emeritus at EPFL Lausanne, architect of the smart specialisation framework that shaped EU Cohesion Policy and oriented billions in structural funds across the continent. This 320-page synthesis is his career statement. The central question: can you put guardrails on the innovation engine without killing it? His answer is yes. His shorthand is “mieux entourer l’innovation”, surrounding rather than directing, shaping the cost landscape of what gets experimented with rather than pre-selecting winners. A government that tries to direct innovation destroys the experimentation space. A government that surrounds it well lowers the cost of experiments society needs and raises the cost of those generating unpriced harm.

Bad innovations are not accidents. The tools to identify them at design stage exist and are systematically not used, because measurement frameworks are calibrated to GDP and private return. This applies directly to AI governance, dual-use biotech, and autonomous systems.
The Tinbergen rule applied to innovation policy: a serious policy toolkit requires direct public production of specific technologies to reduce private research costs, subsidies to early adopters to reduce adoption costs, and mission prizes for the accomplishment of specific objectives. Carbon pricing alone cannot simultaneously reduce emissions, drive innovation, and address distributional consequences. Three targets need three instruments.
Transformative innovation policy means targeting not a product or service but an entire system: sustainable mobility in a region, circular economy for a sector, which requires new public-private partnership logics in which the public sector acts as orchestrator, coordinating multiple interventions rather than simply funding them.
The EU smart specialisation track record is the cautionary tale: widely adopted in official documents, frequently implemented as standard subsidy distribution with a new label. Instrument design matters as much as intent.

Lucas Chancel, Énergie et inégalités : une histoire politique (Seuil, 2025)

Prix de la Pédagogie

Lucas Chancel, co-director of the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics, renewable energy engineer and economist, long-term collaborator with Piketty. A deliberate departure from his earlier quantitative work: a historical argument that energy transitions are always political reorganisations of power before they are technical events, and that the current one is no exception.

Since prehistory, the technical and political frameworks that determine energy use have articulated directly with the distribution of wealth between individuals, social groups, and nations. Every major transition, from the water mill to coal to electrification, restructured hierarchies before it restructured infrastructure.
Phantom hectares: wealthy countries outsource material extraction and pollution to the global south, creating an accounting invisibility that makes the carbon and resource cost of the transition appear cheaper than it is. This is material to how lithium, cobalt, and nickel supply chains are priced in battery and solar investment cases. ESG frameworks have consistently failed to carry this cost.
The 1946 EDF-GDF nationalisation was a deliberate choice to extract a critical infrastructure from private rent logic and subject it to redistributive pricing, producing one of the most equitable energy access records in the OECD for three decades. The argument applies directly to offshore wind concessions, hydrogen infrastructure, and grid ownership today.
A transition governed primarily by price signals will reproduce the power structures of the incumbent energy system rather than disrupt them. Ten years of European carbon markets tend to support that reading empirically.

Mathilde Viennot, La planification écologique (La Découverte, 2025)

Prix du jeune auteur / développement durable

Mathilde Viennot, ENS graduate, doctorate from EHESS, researcher at France Stratégie, founder of the Institut Avant-garde. At 34, her book is an autopsy of the gap between France’s proliferating ecological planning documents and their near-zero implementation rate. The SNBC, the PPE, the PNEC, the France 2030 plan. Volume of documents is not the problem. Their implementation is.

The Monnet Plan worked not because it had legal authority to direct the economy, but because it created deliberative spaces between state, industry, and unions that produced genuine consensus on investment priorities. France’s current planning apparatus has the instruments. It does not have that consensus.
The discount rate problem: standard social discount rates of 3 to 4.5% systematically undervalue damages materialising beyond a 30-year horizon. At 4%, damages occurring in 50 years carry less than 14% of their face value today. Mainstream economic estimates put the GDP cost of one additional degree of warming at roughly 12% of global output, a figure that almost never appears in investment-grade transition appraisals.
Efficiency vs effectiveness: French institutional culture optimises for efficiency within defined parameters while neglecting effectiveness, whether the right objectives are being pursued, whether instruments are mutually compatible, whether affected actors have actually internalised why change is required.
The new planning must reinvent a conception of progress, adapt constantly to a rapidly changing world, and serve a political project rather than a technocratic one. The proliferation of planning documents is itself a symptom: institutional activity substituting for institutional transformation.
On contraction of material flows: ecological planning requires sobriety in the ways we house ourselves, move, and eat, meaning planned contraction in specific material-intensive sectors while services, renewables, and public goods expand. The difference between sectoral contraction and aggregate GDP degrowth matters enormously for political communication.

Bruno Colmant, Laurent Hublet & Marie Vancutsem, Changement de quart (Chronica, 2025)

Prix Turgot francophone

Bruno Colmant, member of the Académie Royale de Belgique, former president of the Brussels Stock Exchange, author of over 70 books with a consistent thesis: money is never neutral, and the neoliberal monetary settlement was a political choice, not a technical given. Laurent Hublet, engineer-economist, MBA from Columbia, philosophy degree from ULB, recently joined Roland Berger. Marie Vancutsem, audiovisual journalist, orchestrates the exchanges. Three generations, three disciplines, one shared premise: the century has just turned 25, and most of what was taken for granted at the start is no longer standing.

The three phenomena that most marked collective consciousness since 2000 are the rise of terrorism after 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the emergence of AI since 2022, three shocks that together produced a fundamental challenge to the neoliberal principles of the Washington Consensus (the set of free-market policy prescriptions promoted by the IMF, World Bank, and US Treasury from the late 1980s onward).
Peak Children: the moment at which humanity produced the most children, placed between 2015 and 2017, a threshold already crossed, with global birth rates now declining. Western populations are now growing primarily through the ageing of existing cohorts. Robotisation and AI may partially compensate for the shrinking workforce in material output terms, but the fiscal and political consequences are only beginning.
The entire contemporary economic model is constructed to make each human being more vulnerable and more isolated, and it is this dynamic that generates authoritarian power on the basis of populism.
Algorithmic bubbles keep people enclosed in their own modes of thought, the shared media space has shrunk, and technology is no longer ideologically neutral, a fragmentation that also feeds disengagement from the ecological question as climate markers are breached one after another.
The book’s structural bet: the three defining shocks of the century so far are not independent events but successive expressions of the same underlying process, the exhaustion of a model of globalisation that promised shared prosperity and delivered concentrated gains, dispersed fragility, and a political backlash its architects neither anticipated nor have yet adequately diagnosed.

Olivier Petitjean & Ivan du Roy, Multinationales : une histoire du monde contemporain (La Découverte, 2025)

Prix collectif

Olivier Petitjean and Ivan du Roy, co-founders of the Observatoire des multinationales, directing 56 contributing researchers and journalists across 864 pages and 174 chronological entries from 1851 to 2025. The goal is to deconstruct the narrative according to which large corporations are indispensable sources of progress and prosperity. “Multinationals tell us many stories, about themselves, about us, about the world, but they obliterate their own history and their own role.”

The expansion of multinationals follows from economic and political choices, but also from legal, technical, financial, and cultural ones. The limited liability company, the bilateral investment treaty (agreements between states that grant foreign investors legal protections, including the right to sue governments before private arbitration tribunals), shareholder primacy doctrine, intellectual property as tradeable asset, the offshore financial centre: none are natural features of markets. Each was designed at a specific moment, by identifiable actors, often against significant opposition.
The Nestlé case across multiple periods illustrates the corporate playbook in miniature: follow access, externalise risk, arbitrage jurisdiction, creating two headquarters in Switzerland and Panama to protect against political risk while developing practices aimed at reducing its global tax burden.
IG Farben supplying Zyklon B to the concentration camps; the CIA organising a coup d’état in Guatemala to protect the United Fruit Company; the fossil fuel giants coordinating to derail climate negotiations. These are not presented as aberrations but as logical extensions of structures built over decades.
The antitrust chapter traces the trust-and-antitrust dynamic as a hundred-year war still in progress, from Standard Oil in 1911 to current EU cases against Google and Apple. Every wave of enforcement has been followed by reconcentration, because the legal framework protects competition as a process while remaining agnostic about market power as an outcome. Thomas Philippon has documented this dynamic rigorously in The Great Reversal, showing how the US went from the world’s most competitive economy to one of the most concentrated, while Europe maintained stronger enforcement. That pattern is directly relevant to how AI infrastructure monopolies will, or will not, be addressed over the next decade.
The most contemporary section covers 2000 to 2025: Amazon’s surveillance capitalism; McKinsey’s advisory scandals; Saudi Aramco as both the world’s most profitable company and its largest single climate contributor; Swiss commodity traders generating a tenth of Swiss GDP while trading Russian hydrocarbons throughout the 2022 war; Lafarge becoming the first company indicted for complicity in crimes against humanity in 2025.

Céline Antonin & Nadia Antonin, Crypto-actifs : une menace pour l’ordre monétaire et financier (Economica, 2025)

Grand Prix nominee

Mother-daughter economists, one at OFCE Sciences Po, the other a former Banque de France executive. Crypto-assets create an unprecedented paradigm, one of the disappearance of public money in favour of private currencies.

Three primary risks to financial stability: concentration of private exchange platforms like Binance and Coinbase, which behave like banks without being regulated as such; liquidity risk; and market risk tied to extreme price volatility.
CBDCs are not optional. As of May 2024, 134 countries representing 98% of global GDP were studying CBDC creation, versus 35 in 2020.
Crypto as a geopolitical weapon: by favouring dollar-backed stablecoins while sidelining central bank digital currencies, the US Genius Act institutionalises a new lever of monetary influence, a crypto-dollarisation carried by the private sector, with an explicit geopolitical ambition to maintain dollar supremacy in a contested international financial order. The USDC alone weighs nearly $60bn versus €170-200m for its euro equivalent. The asymmetry is the point.

Antoine Foucher, Sortir du travail qui ne paie plus (Éditions de l’Aube, 2024)

Grand Prix nominee

Former director of cabinet to Labour Minister Muriel Pénicaud, now founder of Quintet. Sold out and required a second print run.

Purchasing power grew at only 0.8% annually since 2010, versus 5% during the Trente Glorieuses and 2% up to 2008. At current rates, a worker would need 84 years to double their standard of living, versus 15 years in the post-war boom.
Employee share ownership currently reaches only 1-in-30 French workers. Expanding it is the most direct route to reconnecting effort and reward.
Reindustrialisation is structural prerequisite: France has undergone the most severe deindustrialisation in Europe over 50 years, and productivity gains cannot be restored without it.

Félix Torres, Du berceau au tombeau : une histoire critique de l’État-providence (Empreintes / Éditions de l’Éclaireur, 2025)

Grand Prix nominee

ENS-trained historian, doctorate from EHESS.

The French welfare state, founded on contributory logic, has progressively obscured the link between contributions paid and benefits received, to the point where almost no one knows who pays for what or who is entitled to what.
France’s 530 varieties of social régimes generated compounding complexity, and every wave of post-1970s reform has so far failed to reverse fiscal drift.
His prescription involves more individual choice, restored contributivity, and a partial capitalisation pillar for pensions, framed as a civic imperative rather than a purely fiscal one.

Louis de Crevoisier & Paul-Armand Veillon, Répartir du réel : Économie, la parole aux classes moyennes (Éditions de l’Observatoire, 2025)

Grand Prix nominee

Two Ministry of Economy civil servants treat the 2019 Grand Débat National as a research dataset, yellow vest grievance as economics.

Three categories of middle-class expectation: economic security, preservation of lifestyle, social mobility, producing 25 pragmatic, costed proposals on work, housing, transport, and food access.
Rare in French policy writing: takes seriously what people said they wanted before proposing what economists think they should want.
Political relevance: in a landscape where both extremes offer unrealistic promises and the centrist bloc has failed to coalesce, their approach is explicitly evidence-based and post-ideological.

Régis de Laroullière, En route vers les pénuries ? Il y a une alternative (CRAPS, 2025)

Grand Prix nominee

Normalien mathematician, agrégé actuary, énarque (promotion Voltaire), former head of the Crédit Foncier de France and Groupe Médéric.

France has slipped from 7th to 13th in GDP per capita rankings in twenty years, with structural shortages already visible in hospitals, the judiciary, rural commerce, and skilled trades, accelerating across pharmaceutical, digital, and automotive value chains.
Neither spending cuts nor wealth taxes offer a durable exit; only a cultural reorientation toward work and individual accomplishment can reverse the trajectory.
The supply-side case made without compromise: bureaucratisation, welfare dependency, and chaotic governance are the proximate causes of decline, not external shocks.

Bertrand Martinot & Franck Morel, Le travail est la solution (Hermann, 2025)

Prix AF2i

Both push back against the narrative that work is approaching obsolescence, arguing it remains central to social identity but is being let down by a system that fails to translate effort into purchasing power. Martinot won the Grand Prix Turgot in 2014 for Chômage : inverser la courbe, diagnosing unemployment as France’s central labour market crisis. Twelve years later, his new book argues the inverse pathology: low unemployment where work still does not pay enough.

The full arc in two books: from a France where the crisis was that too few people had jobs, to one where having a job is no longer enough to build a life.
Structural frustration over individual laziness: French workers remain attached to their jobs and willing to work. What has collapsed is the reward structure, not the work ethic.
Policy implication: the levers are fiscal, organisational (more autonomy, better management), and ownership-based (expanding employee shareholding).

Édouard Dolley, Vers une finance durable (Arnaud Franel, 2025)

Prix DFCG

A pedagogical work built around 19 practitioner interviews, structured as a bridge between foundational finance concepts and their application to sustainable finance. The guiding premise is direct: you cannot do sustainable finance without first doing finance. Each chapter covers a core concept (interest rates, risk, portfolio construction, derivatives, crypto-assets) before examining how that concept shapes or is reshaped by sustainability constraints.

The sequencing is the argument: most ESG discourse assumes readers already understand the financial mechanics. Dolley starts from first principles, making this genuinely accessible to CFOs, treasury teams, and board members who need to engage with sustainability without a quantitative background.
19 practitioners, plural perspectives: the book deliberately carries no single ideological line on sustainable finance. Interviewees include sceptics and advocates, which produces a more honest picture of where consensus actually exists and where it does not.
The crypto-sustainability tension gets its own treatment: Dolley addresses the environmental cost of proof-of-work blockchains alongside their potential role in green finance instruments, a pairing that most sustainable finance manuals still avoid.

What the Archive Reveals

The programme booklet at Bercy contained the full roll of Grand Prix and Prix du Jury recipients since the early 1990s. A few things are worth noting.

The 1990s jury rewarded European monetary architecture. The Euro was being assembled; the question was how to govern the new structure, not whether it should exist. The 2000s and 2010s brought a sustained reckoning: Cohen’s La prospérité du vice, Orléan’s L’Empire de la valeur, Pitron’s La guerre des métaux rares, Laïdi’s economic lawfare, Jean’s algorithmic governance. The prize had quietly internationalised and started questioning foundations rather than refining mechanisms. The 2019 Grand Prix to Gollier for Le climat après la fin du mois was the most significant recent moment: the first time the jury explicitly centred the tension between ecological constraint and social affordability, a tension that now structures three of this year’s six nominees.

This year’s cohort is a crystallisation. Five of the French nominees (Foucher on purchasing power, Torres on the welfare state, Laroullière on structural shortages, de Crevoisier & Veillon on the middle class, and the Antonins on monetary sovereignty) share the same compound diagnosis: productive model stalled, work no longer generates purchasing power, welfare settlement is fiscally unsustainable, reform blocked by its own fragmentation. Foray (Innovations), Viennot (La planification écologique), and Chancel (Énergie et inégalités) operate at a different register: not about France’s decline but about the institutions through which any transformation would have to pass. The evening at Bercy took place the day after the French municipal elections, where institutional redesign and economic governance barely featured in the campaigns across France, partly because mayors hold little lever over the structural forces these books describe. That gap between the urgency on the page and the silence in the ballot box is perhaps the most honest summary of where France stands in 2026.

Petitjean & du Roy’s Multinationales and Colmant, Hublet & Vancutsem’s Changement de quart sit apart from this Franco-French reckoning, which is precisely their value. The first is a historical archaeology of how corporate power was built, from Singer’s sewing machines in 1851 to Lafarge’s indictment in 2025. The second is a view from Brussels of what the century’s first quarter looks like when you are not the country producing most of the analysis about it.

The Prix Turgot has stayed intellectually honest about shifting its frame as the questions changed across 39 editions, a credit to Jean-Louis Chambon, its founding force and Président fondateur et d’honneur of the Cercle, to Kathleen Wantz-O’Rourke who now leads it as Présidente, to Augustin de Romanet as Président du Cercle, to Jean-Jacques Pluchart and Florence Anglès who read and review 150 to 200 books each year to produce the shortlist, and to Jean-Claude Trichet who has chaired the Grand Jury for over two decades, providing the intellectual continuity that gives the prize its weight. A prize is only as good as the people willing to read everything before deciding what matters.

The Full Ceremony

The complete ceremony was recorded and is available below. It captures the jury deliberations, the laureate speeches, and the exchanges that followed, a useful complement to the written notes above.